Often when learning or testing out an implementation in planning, entering into a REPL to get some feedback and play with something more physical is desirable.

Here are some tips to improve your rails console workflow:

Specify the environment you wish to use

Maybe you want to try and reproduce an error in production during your test runs. Maybe you want to seed the database for your development server before having created a seed file. Maybe you’re just feeling wild for the day and want to switch things up.

Rails gives you the option to select the environment for the console session:

>rails c --environment=test [test/development/production/...other...]
>rails c test  # as a shorthand

Note: The default environment is set to development

Sandbox so your DB entries do not persist</h3> Often I find myself wanting to just play around with the current build, knowingly wanting to throw away the changes after. Sandboxing is a great way to do this while reducing your cleanup workflow. ``` >rails c --sandbox >rails c -s ``` This saves you from having to write out the following to return to a seeded state: ``` >rake db:reset RAILS_ENV=[environment] ```